Linux is Extremely slow.

RH Fedora 5. Booting takes about a minute to get the log-in screen but it takes another two full minutes of disk grinding to get the wall paper up and the menus. And most every program (Firefox, Evolution, GIMP, graphics viewers, etc take a terrible long time to load.)

"Disk grinding" should not occur and usually means that either you don't have the recommended amount of RAM in the system (at least 256 mb) for Fedora Core 5, you did not allow a swap file to be created during the installation (did an expert install for the filesystems), or have a very small hard drive on the system.

Does your system meet the system requirements for Fedora Core 5?

Seriously, Windows XP takes about 3-4 minutes to load on my Athlon XP 2100+ system (before I can do any tasks), due to all the virus and spyware programs loading in the background.

Conversely, Puppy Linux, a lightweight distro, takes about 15 seconds to load to the GUI.